{"id":246995,"date":"2023-10-30T12:00:29","date_gmt":"2023-10-30T12:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=246995"},"modified":"2023-10-27T06:35:43","modified_gmt":"2023-10-27T05:35:43","slug":"israels-collective-punishment-of-gaza-must-end","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/10\/israels-collective-punishment-of-gaza-must-end\/","title":{"rendered":"Israel\u2019s Collective Punishment of Gaza Must End"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Democracy NOW!<\/p><\/div>\n

26 Oct 2023 –<\/em> United Nations Secretary-General Ant\u00f3nio Guterres addressed the UN Security Council on Tuesday [24 Oct], saying, \u201cTo ease epic suffering, make the delivery of aid easier and safer, and facilitate the release of hostages, I reiterate my appeal for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire.\u201d He went on to criticize Israel\u2019s siege and bombardment of Gaza in retaliation for the October 7th attack by Hamas, which killed over 1,300 Israelis:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their lands steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence, their economy stifled, their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing. But the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas, and those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s UN ambassador demanded Guterres\u2019 resignation, adding, \u201cwe will refuse to issue visas to UN representatives\u2026to teach them a lesson.\u201d The U.S. presented a Security Council resolution for a \u201chumanitarian pause\u201d in Gaza, which Russia and China vetoed saying it did not go far enough. Russia countered with a full ceasefire resolution that the US and UK vetoed.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the death toll in Gaza continues to climb, with at least 7,000 Palestinians killed since October 7th, including nearly 3,000 children, according to Gaza\u2019s Health Ministry. The Israeli military and armed settlers have also killed more than 100 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank since October 7th, adding to the record number of Palestinians killed in the West Bank this year.<\/p>\n

Israel has held the Gaza Strip under a devastating blockade since 2006, trapping its 2.4 million residents in what is arguably the world\u2019s largest open air prison. Israel limits the delivery of food, fuel, water and medicine and imposes apartheid controls on who can enter and leave. The current complete shutoff of life-sustaining supplies that Israel imposed on October 7th, compounded by the relentless airstrikes, has created what Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner-General of UNRWA<\/span>, the United Nations\u2019 Palestinian relief agency, describes as \u201chell on Earth.\u201d He writes, \u201cEntire neighborhoods are being flattened over the heads of civilians.\u201d<\/p>\n

Among those killed were the wife, daughter and son of Al Jazeera Arabic\u2019s Gaza bureau chief Wael Al-Dahdouh, called by many \u201cthe Voice of Gaza.\u201d They were killed in the south of Gaza, in an Israeli airstrike. \u201cWael, like many of us, like thousands of Palestinians who got the order to evacuate from the north and from Gaza City to the south, heeded that order and moved his family to the south, to Nuseirat refugee camp,\u201d Al Jazeera correspondent Youmna ElSayed said on the Democracy Now! news hour, the day after the airstrike.<\/a> \u201cWhen we say there is no safe place in Gaza, we\u2019re not lying\u2026Why did they ask us to go to the south?\u201d<\/p>\n

Oxfam\u2019s Middle East Regional Director Sally Abi Khalil said in a statement, \u201cThe situation is nothing short of horrific\u2013where is humanity? Millions of civilians are being collectively punished in full view of the world, there can be no justification for using starvation as a weapon of war.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gaza\u2019s healthcare infrastructure is on the brink of collapse. Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the head of pediatrics at Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza told Al Jazeera, \u201cWe are overwhelmed with dozens of wounded, dying and dead children coming in\u2026The pace of strikes is escalating, and our supplies are near depletion. When the fuel runs out tomorrow, this hospital will rapidly become a mass grave.\u201d Dr. Mohammad Abu Salmiya, the director of Al Shifa Hospital, Gaza\u2019s largest hospital, likened expected deaths of patients dependent on electricity for respirators or dialysis machines to \u201cpremeditated murder.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Wednesday, in a White House Rose Garden speech, President Joe Biden questioned the reported numbers of Palestinians killed in Gaza. \u201cI have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I\u2019m sure innocents have been killed, and it\u2019s the price of waging a war,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Last February, months before the October 7th Hamas attack, Haaretz, one of Israel\u2019s most influential newspapers, published an editorial, referring to the collective punishment that followed sporadic attacks on Israeli citizens by Palestinans: \u201cLaws that permit Israel to violate international law and the laws of occupation will not only fail to thwart terrorism, but will drag Israel to the defendants\u2019 dock of the international community.\u201d<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s collective punishment of Palestinians is nothing new. But this latest siege of Gaza, described by Israeli Holocaust historian Raz Segal<\/a> as \u201ca textbook case of genocide,\u201d must stop now.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Amy Goodman is the host of \u201c<\/em>Democracy Now!\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of <\/em>Breaking the Sound Barrier, released in paperback and now a <\/em>New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n

Denis Moynihan is the co-founder of <\/em>Democracy Now! Since 2002, he has participated in the organization\u2019s worldwide distribution, infrastructure development, and the coordination of complex live broadcasts from many continents. He lives in Denver where he is developing a new noncommercial community radio station.<\/em><\/p>\n

The original content of this program is licensed under a <\/em>Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 democracynow.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cIt is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their lands steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence, their economy stifled, their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.\u201d — UN Secretary-General Ant\u00f3nio Guterres<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":66339,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[928,532,101,100,2898,87,865,2414,2415,2416,3120,767,771,427,85,2897,880,99,92,1025,886],"class_list":["post-246995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-palestine-israel-gaza-genocide","tag-bds-boycott-divestment-sanctions","tag-colonialism","tag-cultural-violence","tag-direct-violence","tag-ecocide","tag-gaza","tag-genocide","tag-israeli-apartheid","tag-israeli-army","tag-israeli-occupation","tag-jewish-settlers","tag-middle-east","tag-nakba","tag-palestine","tag-palestine-israel","tag-sociocide","tag-state-terrorism","tag-structural-violence","tag-violent-conflict","tag-west-bank","tag-zionism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246995"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":247001,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246995\/revisions\/247001"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}